Telling Our Story: AI, Influence, and the Future of Higher Ed Marketing with Thomas Broadus

What does it mean to market a university in a time of rapid change?

In this episode of UnchartED State, hosts Susan Seal and Maddie Ludt are joined by Thomas Broadus, Chief Marketing Officer at Mississippi State University. With more than two decades of experience in marketing, digital strategy, and communications, Thomas shares how universities are rethinking storytelling, brand strategy, and audience engagement in a fast-moving media landscape.

The conversation explores how higher education marketing has evolved, from traditional advertising and paid media to authentic storytelling, influencer-style student content, and algorithm-driven discovery. Thomas also discusses how emerging technologies like AI are reshaping marketing workflows, search visibility, and how prospective students discover universities.

Along the way, the discussion highlights the challenge of communicating higher education’s value in an era when public trust is shifting, and why telling real stories of impact, research, and student success matters more than ever.

In This Episode:

• What a Chief Marketing Officer does at a university
• How storytelling shapes a university’s brand and reputation
• The growing role of student voices and authentic content
• How AI and AEO is transforming marketing, search, and content creation
• Why universities must rethink how prospective students discover programs
• Communicating the value and impact of higher education today
• Using storytelling to connect research, learning, and real-world outcomes

From brand strategy to emerging technologies, this episode offers an inside look at how universities are navigating the evolving world of higher education marketing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

We're coming back from a car trip, and Lex in the back seat said to his mom, Is like, Mom, I've been thinking more about college. It's like, okay, great. It's like me and Chat have been having a discussion about it. It was like, Chat, and Chat GBT have been having a lot of discussions, and he's running analytics and money and differences and all that stuff happening in that system. Where if we go back to our AEO conversation, we are not optimized to be in in that conversation.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Uncharted State, where we discuss all the changes happening in higher ed. I'm Susan Seal, one of your hosts, and uh here with Maddie Lute, the other one. What an intro. Yeah. Um, you've been traveling.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

I have. I've been all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Tis the season for recruitment and all the things. All the things. So we're good. Uh we also have with us today Thomas Broadas. Uh our guest. And uh Thomas is our uh Mississippi State University Chief Marketing Officer. And uh that's where he leads our brand and visibility strategies. And you've got over 20 years of experience. So you started 10?

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Yeah, almost a century ago. That's what we like to say. Last was a whole nother century. A century ago. Yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Almost uh 20 years of uh experience in marketing, communication, digital strategies, and started your career as a software developer.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Yes, COBOL. Uh so really hardcore.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Yeah. And then uh later uh transitioned into digital outreach and eventually becoming president of a marketing agency in Charleston, South Carolina. And here you are now.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Here I am.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

So welcome. Thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah. So what is a chief marketing officer at a university like ours? And how has it evolved in the last uh few years or the last you know, day and a half?

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Well, Mississippi State's unique because it didn't exist here until um Dr. Keenum and um a few others got together and said, hey, we really want to take an initiative to focus on the brand. Mission does a great job at finding new students, recruitment, athletics. They all do their own thing and tell their own story, but nobody was really shepherding the brand of the university. So they decided to put in an effort to create this chief marketing officer position within the Office of Public Affairs, which is where I work. So it was kind of cool to come in seeing marketing from the client side and the agency side to be able to bring that to Mississippi State and say, all right, this chief marketing officer position is gonna be responsible for how people think about the brand and the stories that we tell and how we communicate with a bunch of audiences. That was one of the first things we had to do. Chief marketing officer, who are we gonna talk to? So we decided that's you know, our prospective students, our current students, our faculty and staff, and our alumni. So, how do we really collaborate and tell stories that get them excited and as much overlap as possible between either the nostalgia of the alumni, understanding what the current students are going through, or those prospective students seeing what's really exciting that the current students are dealing with, or those faculty and staff really seeing the pride and the things that they're putting into their students that are winning amazing different scholarships and awards and doing some great work and even some startups right here at Mississippi. So that's a long answer, but it really is shepherding that brand to tell those audience stories in a bunch of different ways.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

And that's pretty consistent what other universities that are.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

I think that's really clearly again the the lanes can be separated or shepherded out into different ways, but I think this is really the brand position, which when you find that you've marketing officers at other universities, it's really modeled after what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

So, how has that role changed? I mean, you said it's new here, yeah. But how how are how has it evolved?

SPEAKER_02 3:45

Think about five years ago in marketing and what we're doing today, vastly different strategies. Five years ago, you were still running a lot of paid media marketing, you were doing some organic, right? You were still figuring out TikTok five years ago. We're still figuring out this thing that we're hearing about in AI and what does that mean? How is that gonna change what I do? I think for us as marketers, what we see the changes, the tools that we have and the expectations of how we're gonna work together. So being able now to produce video faster, quicker, being able to sit down and create podcasts and generate content that other people would be interested in. You know, five years ago, you wouldn't be able to do that as easily as you can today to reach as many people as you possibly can. So for us, it really has shifted from a paid media strategy. We got to be in all the things, we got to figure out the TV schedule, we got to be on broadcast, to what stories can we tell and how can we utilize organic content to really push that out to the audiences? And then the algorithms kind of take over, and that's how your discovery happens. You know, you can push content in front of people or you can pull them to your content. And now we're doing much more of pulling people into our content based on algorithms helping them find where we are.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

So is the is marketing for higher ed becoming more like consumer marketing?

SPEAKER_02 5:04

I think so. I think from my position, coming in from so much agency and so much worried about are we selling the widget? Are we doing the thing? How are we representing the brand? Are we bringing more sales in? I think if we think of it in the terms of, I just need to bring more eyes to the product and it'll sell itself, the education quality here, the hands-on experience here, all the things that give us the unique advantages to be, you know, the university of choice for the state of Mississippi, which we are for Mississippians, all that has to come down to are we thinking about the university as a storytelling product? And that's where the CMO position came into play.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Let's talk about some of those stories that we tell, you know, in consumer marketing, influencer marketing is really popular. So, what does that strategy look like in higher education? And is that an opportunity for student voices to be replacing our institutional voice or how do those coexist?

SPEAKER_02 5:58

Yeah, I it happens every day on campus, for good or for bad. Students are telling their perspective and their story about the university. And to do that in a way that benefits the university, we have to begin thinking about how we could harness that. It's already out there. It's all the horses are out of the barn, right? How can I go through and empower those students to have a better position to tell a story about the university? And that's where the influencer marketing idea comes into play. You know, we get tons of pitches from tons of different vendors all the time about ways to do X, Y, and Z. And commonly what they will do is they'll try to associate us directly with, you know, a sales property that, hey, we want you to go sell this widget, and we're gonna go hire this influencer who has a really big reach to sell this thing for you. Immediately, that's a no for us. There's no authenticity, there's no connection with that person to the university. We've got to figure out how to use that authenticity of either our alumni, going back to our four audiences, or our students to tell that story in a really interesting and a positive way for us. Not to say that all the instances are gonna be exciting. Sometimes it's game day atmosphere, which is great. Arizona State, right? Millions and millions of extra views after the storming of the field, sometimes in big losses. You know, you get just as many views, but the sentiment changes. So we got to think about how to how do we use that and empower it. So students are creating influencer marketing for us today. What we're trying to do now is actively how do we empower them to be a partner with us in doing that? Or how do we be good partners for them and how they tell that story? Other universities are trying to figure it out. I can't point to a very successful this platform as the one that we would want to go model. So it is kind of cool to be in the the frontier and trying to adapt and you know put this thing together for us here at Mississippi State.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Yeah. So how do you balance? I mean, part of your job is the brand and the tone and the all the things that we work really hard to do. So, how do you balance that with the authenticity of the influencer?

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Yeah, I I think what you do is you set yourself up for the best example. So, how I would like to see if I get to draw it out and empower, this is what an influencer program looks like. It's finding students that are on campus that already have a large audience. It's something that they're passionate about, which is hopefully in their major. And then how can we partner with them to tell more about that major? And we see students that go to New York City for fashion design internships. We want to partner with them. And how can we capture that? And they're creating social and they may have 5,000 followers. How can we use our 150 or our 200 or in total over 700, almost 780,000 followers to empower that student to have an audience? And now you see a really good relationship going back and forth. We get the content, they get a little rub, and hopefully get to grow their following. So we want to find them in those situations and those solutions. Much more so, the the athletic stuff is gonna happen. They're gonna be at the games, the party stuff is gonna happen. They're gonna be at the charity events like Charity Bowl from our uh Panolytic and our uh Greek life, or they're gonna be at lunch sitting around talking about rating their food on how good it was. So some of those things are gonna happen. The ones that we want to amplify are the ones that are gonna be the ones that we want people to see in our university.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

So I we represent a lot of the adult learners. Yes. From our online to our academic programs. And one of the things that we've done is with Mississippi State having such a great geosciences program, so many of the meteorologists, and a lot of those have have been online students. Yes. And so that's that's an area from that adult learner that's not the 19, 20-year-old at the game or whatever, but it's a different way of pulling in those.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Right. Look, we were talking about early, over 170 online programs that people can adopt into. Uh, you know, when I got my master's degree, online wasn't an option. Yeah. And that wasn't that long ago. It doesn't seem like that long ago. I guess 2011 and 12 was a lifetime ago. But those opportunities and those students, how can we connect with them and how can we use their voice? Because now suddenly I don't have to be in Starkville. I can be in Indiana, I can be in California, I can be in Italy. As long as those students are participating and using our programs for a search certificate or a degree program, we got to figure out ways to work with them so that other people can see that story. Because it really is about empowerment in this day and age to be able to get a degree, to upskill, to reskill, to change careers. Like that happens in your 40s, in your 50s. Those things can always happen. Um, and how do we tell those stories? How do we find those people that are interested and want to? Not everybody is as outgoing on social like you think they are. Some of them are still very bashful. It may have a wonderful story. And again, that's where we can partner to help them tell that story in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Well, and and Maddie has is one that's we do out there talking to.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yeah. Well, Jared, uh, our producer and I do graduation videos every semester for our online students. And sometimes we find that the person with the best story didn't even sign up. I mean, that happened our our first go. The person who had the best story that really needed to be heard about how she was empowered as an online student because she had time to think about her answers and wasn't called on cold in class and could really like analyze and go deeper. She wasn't even supposed to be one of our video interviews. Yeah. She just wandered into the room.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Those stories are out there every day across everything you can imagine. And even with limited resources and our people and the times, you had two of them, right? If you had 20, how many more stories could you tell? So that's where we've got to be really smart and savvy about how do we tell these stories? How do we capture them? How do we make people comfortable to come to us in some different ways? So those are the pieces and parts that are still the challenge because we miss stories every day across the university. 20,000 students here on campus, like something exciting is happening right now outside of this podcast. Uh, so how do we go and find it?

SPEAKER_01 12:07

So we have to talk about AI.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Yep. I I'm not scared of it. I, you know, I've done a lot of seminars. I do a lot of talking about AI. I was listening to some stories actually on the way over here, and I stayed in the car a couple more minutes because I wanted to hear it. And the person on the radio was still talking about well, AI can't create people because they've got six fingers or it gives them too many teeth. And I was like, man, if you're thinking about it in that way, that's that's two years ago. Today it creates a video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt having a fight, and you can't tell the difference. So, how do we use it? What do we want to do with it? How do we empower it? Is it going to replace jobs? What I've seen is not so much that it's replacing jobs in our field, which is also a very creative field. We're dealing with videographers, we're dealing with graphic designers and writers. What it's what it's creating is the expectation for them to do more because they have these tools now, and your output can go up so much more. You can do so many more things. Like the expectation is two or three X on the output. Not that I'm gonna get rid of a position or anything like that. So we've got to adopt it. It's the same argument over the last hundred years, from the horse salesman to the car salesman, right? The big changes there about what was gonna happen with it, from the yellow pages to Google, right? The upending, and before that, right, it was the Dewey Decimal system. All these things continually evolve in our technologies. And if we can embrace them and adapt to them, we can empower them to be good for us. And that's the key is how do we make these systems good for us in ethical ways and in content ways or production.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Well, and and I think if you if you look at maybe units like ours as a consumer of yours, like we may, you know, Thomas, we need you to help us with this, then I think it also helps us communicate what we want more. I mean, using AI to okay, how do how do I express this? Or what are some graphics or what are some video and understanding that you're gonna do it, but we can express it better.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

Right. And we've the the concerns are, and anybody can open up these systems now and create anything. Right. And that's true. And that that again, that's yeah, there's no coming back from that in that world. But could we create more internal systems that use it as a support? So say you had to create um some sort of flyer, but you had an old logo. So you submit it to the university and we kick it back and it's like, oh, you can't do this. You had the old logo, or you know what, that maroon's a little bit off. You didn't use the right hex code. What if that AI system had all that pre-built into it? So every tool that you're using, every graphic that you have is already pre-approved. That's a way to use AI in a smart system. But the other thing you have to realize is there are entire careers that are coming in this platform around what we call prompting. And it's how to give instructions to the AI. And the most basic example I can give you is sit down with the youngest person you know and ask them to teach you how to make a peanut butter sandwich. So they're gonna say, Well, you need to go get the bread. It's like, so go get the bread. And then they're gonna say, put the peanut butter on the bread. And then you just take the jar of peanut butter and then put it on top of a loaf of bread. And they're like, no, no, no. And then they'll say, now you got to take out a piece of bread. So you open up the bread and you pull it out. And let's say, now put the peanut butter on, and you still put in the jar of peanut butter. You start to realize there are a lot of steps to something that is very simple. And my coding background comes into play here is it's always gonna do exactly what you tell it to do. So understanding the prompts and how to get out of these systems what you actually want that is quality, that is usable, that is editable, so you can proof and publish whatever it may be, a press release or a flyer or any newsletter article or anything like that. We have to be very intelligent because it's only gonna give us and regurgitate as good as we put into it, just like old coding systems back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

We used to use that example in tech writing. I taught tech writing back in the day. And we we would uh have somebody putting on a coat, and every student would take turns at telling them the next step, and then halftime it was upside down or they had a leg in the arm, or because you missed those steps.

SPEAKER_02 16:21

That is that is an incredibly valuable skill now uh that people need to understand in those prompting situations because now you can be a project manager and you can use these different systems like Claude or whatever to create entire ecosystems to tackle specific tasks. But if you can't tell it the steps to do what it needs to do, it's not gonna be a benefit to anybody, or it could harm you because you're gonna get some bad stuff that comes out of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

But we're even moving past that to the agents.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah. And that's where that's where it is. Like I can, I could create a startup today. I could create a marketing startup if I wanted to, to create a bunch of different social media content and have it generate the images and have it generate the content and the context, and then just schedule it and push it all out the door. Uh, Dr. Julie Jordan is working uh intensely on a lot of those systems to understand it for the university. And, you know, Mississippi has suddenly become a hotbed for these AI data centers now with Amazon in play and now XAI and a couple other systems. So I'm excited where Mississippi State is at the forefront of this. We also have undergrad degrees in AI, we have a master's degree in AI. So we're also teaching the students how to create these systems and these processes to be able to really harness this stuff for the future.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

I was at a um a conference and they were talking about AEO. And uh so I was messaging our folks back at the office and going, so what are we doing about AEO? And you know, they sent me all these things that we were working on and how we were approaching it. And I said, Okay, I just want you to understand an hour ago, I didn't know what that was. So I'm not pressuring you, but I uh so what is the AEO, SEO all of it?

SPEAKER_02 18:01

There's different ones. So I can remember vividly when this stuff started coming into my feed and I'm in client meetings and they're talking about stuff and they're using this language, and I'm like, you know, like first thing I gotta do is like, I gotta talk to an expert, I gotta Google what this thing is. Um, so SEO, search engine optimization, it's all the ways that we can ensure that our website shows up when somebody does a request. Normally it's a Google, right? So if they're searching for something in an operating system that we want to be able to show up for, and we can do that in a bunch of different ways. And we've known that for 20 years and how to manipulate and change and min-max that whole game to make sure that we show up at the top.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

That's where our effort's been.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

In increasing our SEO.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Well, so Susan, what happens when the students quit using Google and now they're using Chat GPT? It's a whole other ecosystem that we've got to be aware of how we show up and how we rank in those systems. So AEO, AI, engine optimization. I've also seen it um in some different languages like GEO and some other stuff. You know, how are we doing GPT, engine optimization? How do we show up and rank in those positions when somebody is searching in an entirely different ecosystem? And my learning has been that it's similar tactics, but it's much more important on the other things that other people say about you versus what your website says about you. So we've got to identify important sites that collect information. Reddit is a big one. Uh, there's other sites, social media is a big one, that they have elaborate partnerships with. Google has a huge partnership with Reddit to feed its SEO engine now. And we're seeing the same thing happen with um OpenAI and these other platforms. So the content creator used to have to think about writing. And now they had to start thinking about how do I write so the search engines can find me. And now you got to start thinking about how can people find me, how can the search engines find me, how can these bot systems find me and these chats, but also be relevant enough in the same way that people can understand what I'm saying when they're looking for it. So it's an entirely new career path, it's an entirely new optimization system. But the heart of it is we need to show up at the top of the list. If somebody's asking Chat GPT, what college should I go to? I live in Indiana. What's my best online opportunity to go get a master's degree in meteorology? How are we ranking and showing up for those questions? And in Google, I can go and tell you every search that's happening, I have zero visibility in these open AI systems or these other chatbots. So we don't know until you got to figure it out or partner with somebody that's got access to build a system so that we can see results.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

So in in marketing, you want it to pull from Reddit. And so when you're looking in the academic side of things, the angst is 40% of AI is pulling from Reddit. And that's not necessarily what we want. So it's terrible, right? So the yeah, so marketing using AI is different than what we Yes.

SPEAKER_02 21:10

A friend of mine uh who posted, he's actually a president of an ad agency, a large agency that does SEO and AU and all these other things. And he ran in on there and he talked about Reddit uh and uh post it on LinkedIn, and I responded and I said, Well, look, I really appreciate this direct thought. I value Reddit because of how these chat bots and these open AIs and these LLMs, large language models, value Reddit, not because I personally value Reddit. And I that has to lead me, right? It's fact overficial. That fact says that I've got to spend time on that platform. And I don't know if that means I've got to develop content or is my time better spent in responding to content. Because if you're doing a search, you can check every day and get a list of mentions. And anybody that mentioned Mississippi State, you can go and see is this A legitimate response? Or is this somebody that's talking about athletics? Or is this somebody that's asking a question about how do I do this application thing at Mississippi State? I'm really considering going into engineering here or at school too. And if we're not responding and they are, we're missing the boat because we think it's a website that we shouldn't be involved in. So there's lots of reasons now for universities to be involved in that platform. And it's mainly because the other systems put so much value into that platform. We're now forced to.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Yeah. It's just, yeah, it just different. Um looking at it from the academic side of if you're using it to teach students or the developmental models is different than the marketing side.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

Yeah. And I think for us it really is about that student discovery, that prospective student discovery. I'm not so much looking for students that have comments or are venting about something. I'm looking for those questions that prospective students are asking because if I can respond to those, we show up better in those AEO searches, which is important because it sees that as a valid source.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Are they using Reddit as well? Do you think I mean yeah? It's not a segment.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Yeah. And I think our adult learners are also like very savvy with AI tools. Um, I I think it's an easier place to ask a question than someone face to face. It's more comfortable, especially, you know, being out of school for a while, being unsure about our processes, which can be tough to navigate if you're unfamiliar. Um, it removes that human barrier of being judged for asking a question. So I think anywhere where you can have some level of anonymity or protection from being in an uncomfortable situation is appealing.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

That's right. Well, and another thing you talk about your older learners that are trying to reskill this. I was sitting down at the desk the other day and I just had this kind of epiphany like I'm typing on a keyboard. And that's the same style keyboard from back in 1985 when little T Bro was sitting down on his Commodore 64 programming in Basic. I was like, why are we still using this? Because my kids don't, when they have questions, they're just talking to Chat GPT or they're talking to whatever they're bad. And it's a conversation they have back and forth. There's no keyboard input there. So they're already adapting to that technology. And the flip to that is our older folks, um, the president of one of the agencies that I used to work at never typed on the C or he always talked to stuff. Like it's just so much easier. So I think that that puts them in a very comfortable position with these GPTs because now they're having a conversation back and forth, which makes it you know, it's like what again, why am I using a mouse and a keyboard? What are we doing here?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Because that's what we that's what we've got to do. We've always done it.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

I don't mean it's always the way we should do it. That's right, it's just how we're comfortable with doing it.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Uh-huh. Making the shift.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

So switching just a little bit. Um we talk a lot about how higher education, getting a degree truly does change somebody's life. I mean, it is transformational. And it provides opportunities from their career, uh just in their life. Uh we have we have great stories like we were talking about with um some people coming back because they promised uh their parent they would or they want to make their children proud of them. You know, some of those kind of things that aren't necessarily uh really easy to necessarily quantify. So how do we turn and and you've got so many people in so many conversations now? It's all about ROI, it's all about uh, you know, uh the career uh connection to the degree uh we had uh Kathleen Delasky on a few episodes ago talking about her book, Who Needs College Anymore? And so how do we take those things like transformation and they're wanting to know about the ROI? How do we market that uh in a way that really does connect? And we talk a lot about family here. Well, everybody talks about being part of the family, but when people come on this campus, that is one of the things that they say it feels more like family here. I feel wanted here than when I've been in other campuses. So it's a real thing. It's not just a marketing, but it sounds like a marketing thing. Well, how how do we do those things?

SPEAKER_02 26:23

That's a great question. So coming in about two years ago when when I joined the university, we asked a lot of opinion. Why does everybody feel like people come here? What are the difference makers? And we heard a lot of things. One is it really is a more unique campus visit experience by how you're welcomed and how you're treated and how you're customized to on what you want to do. The other is, you know, more hands-on experience in your classes. We heard from employers that said they love to hire bulldogs because they're more career ready. So I'm sure all of the universities have some sort of advantages in those ways, but we heard it here over and over again. So I'm the facts over feelings guys. Like, that's lovely that you feel that way. Now you got to prove it to me. Yeah. So we did a lot of surveys. We talked to a lot of people, we talked to a lot of students, we talked to a lot of student parents. And what we found was one of the things that kept coming up over and over again was I came here and I'm an out-of-state student because on my visit, I was treated like family. Like they really invested and cared in me. I went to other schools and they didn't care if I came or not. I was just a number to them. So the first step is getting them here, making sure that they feel welcomed because now your anxiety, right? It comes down pretty bit. I'm I'm surrounded by people that are gonna, you know, really be focused towards my success and my degree program, whatever that may be, over the next four or five years, six if they go to school and maybe get another degree, which we see a lot of. The other thing that was very fascinating was we talked to a lot of people that this is the second part of their career because they were a student here, they left and they came back because they wanted to be a part of that for the that future generation and to give back either at the university level or whatever. So that to me was really remarkable that people chose to be here in Starkville because of that. They wanted to give back, which I think highlights that family feel again, because now you have people that you don't even know that are really rooting on for your success. And then if you just extend that through the video screen, right? So that internet connection, it's the same support that we really want those online students to feel when they come in. They are surrounded by people that want to see them succeed in a lot of different ways, whether that's, you know, the markstone of I need to get my degree because somebody in my family wanted me to go get that degree. Or it's I need to do this to provide more for my family. Those opportunities are there, over 170 programs. How do we match them up? How do we take care of them in ways that are gonna set them up to succeed versus just putting them through a program and taking a check and giving them a degree at the end of it? And we have seen sentiment after sentiment across the university that it really is an investment in that student's life, which is gonna reskill them for whatever it is they're gonna do next. Which, you know, we talk to a lot of students in marketing, they all want to work here in Starkville. And I was like, the marketing jobs at the university are awesome, but there may be four a year that open up. So I encourage you to go out and find something, and a lot of them do look back out, or they'll reach back out and say, Hey, be sure to let me know if there's an opening. I'd love to get back to Starkville, yeah, to come here, which I think is is a wonderful sentiment about what this university does for its um alumna and for all of its students.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

We used to have a a little phrase, uh the Center for Distance Education, uh, even there, you're here. Uh, and because we wanted them to feel that regardless of where you are around the world, you're connected back to us. Yeah, you are a bulldog. And it's a little harder to create that when somebody's sitting in Indiana, as you said. Right. Um and and may not even uh have that SEC connection and the football connection, or even know that we're bulldogs. You know, um They may not care a bit about that. They may or they don't know well, that was one thing when we had um the we ring true some of our students they had no idea what that meant. What the connection was because they didn't know the cowbell was a thing.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Um, and so finding those ways to connect with them in the way they want to be connected with uh is is is a another layer uh well to do.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

Just a small way that we can reconnect and and kind of shear that bulldog experience, especially after they've graduated. You talked about our meteorology program, right? We say the line one out of three honor meteorologists have a degree or a certificate from Mississippi State University, and we're very excited about that. And we see our meteorologists on TV every day, even when you don't realize it. So we wanted to do something special for them. And we put together some packages and worked with a lot of partners. Our school here, uh, working with Dr. Steel and online, working with our arts and sciences department, working with our licensing team, and we put together care packages for a bunch of those folks that we could find and verify they were at a station. And then we mailed them all out. And wouldn't you know what all these meteorologists that are a little vain? I'm sorry, meteorologists, but you are, they got on their Instagrams and said, look what the university sent us. And some of them, you know, we identified specifically as online students. So we gave them a little extra just for that online relationship. So that was a fun way to connect them to the universities and encouraging them to even if you don't know the person next to you or you don't have an alumni group in your sector, you are a bulldog. And that was a lot of fun. And we had about, you know, 30 of them responded back on Instagram and in a bunch of different ways. So that was a really fun way to connect to those people that had graduated who may not have actually connected here.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

So the National Student Uh Research Center has said there's 43 and a half million adults who have some college no degree. So that's not counting the people who have no degree. The people who have a degree that are coming back. There's three and a half million high school students, seniors. So there's a whole lot of people in that adult pool compared to and and one of the things, but but but universities as a whole, they focus on the high school student coming in, or or maybe the transfer student, because we have a lot of transfer students, community colleges too. So how do we make that shift? And you and I've had these conversations because I yeah, I've sent you videos like you know, Thomas, this is a great commercial. Look how they highlight online and not just say come to start.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Um how how do we make that shift? Understanding that of 22,000 students, we have 3,000 of them. But I think the opportunity out of those 40 something million is to grow.

SPEAKER_02 33:06

I think a lot of it it becomes a math problem. So the math comes into if I'm a high school student, where am I going to earn more in the long term? And we know more and more there are non-college pathways for a lot of these students that maybe didn't have one before. So there's also a lot of competition in the space. We also have the enrollment clip, right? So there's less college eligible kids than there were a decade ago. So lots of things are playing. And like you said, I've always looked at so the online learning opportunity is the unlimited growth plan. And that's where you can scale up quicker. You can put in place tools that you need faster than you can build a an 800-room residence hall, um, which all those things are wonderful and they make our campus thrive. But how do we reach those folks that need to skill with the things that we offer better than anybody else? Meteorology is an example, so we can just stay with that. You know, they can come and use our online programs to do that. But you can also do electrical engineering. You can do a lot of other things that you may not have expected in a online environment for that person who, you know what, maybe I didn't go to college, maybe I went to community college, maybe I did some, but I've been in this field and I'm starting to hit my ceiling. And to unlock that growth, I've got to go get that degree. Well, you can do that right here in Mississippi State, especially in electrical engineering, with a lot of opportunity in our state for growth, whether it's working on some of these AI data centers, which need a lot of electricity and electrical planning, whether it's working with our great partners either at HHI or Chevron or Camgen or any of these other companies that we have right in our backyard and our footprint in the state of Mississippi, not to mention what's going on in Texas, where we have a ton of alumni or other places and Southern Company. We can provide opportunities for those folks that are hitting that ceiling that are ready to reskill and do a little bit more earning. But it comes to a math problem. How much is it gonna cost me? What's my long-term investment and what's my return going to be? If you're thinking about the short term, it's probably not gonna work out for you because you're just thinking about, well, I got to go to school and I'm working and I got kids, and now my week is suddenly gonna be a 65, 80 hour a week. We also have to overcome those fears. Like you can do this asynchronously. How do you say it? That was close. I did it. All right. Or you could do it on your own pace in a way that maybe you're only doing three hours a semester and you're working towards it, and maybe your company's paying for it. Those are the options that are out there that we want people to start asking. And we would love to help answer those questions, but I'm sure a lot of those employers in the state of Mississippi can help them answer it as well. That's how you tap into that 40 million. You show the advantage, you share the partnership, and then you show them the outcome by talking to our alumni that have done that path before. I am such a non-traditional student. I went to high school, I get out of high school, my first semester, like summer school, dad's like, you're in trigonometry. Congratulations. So I was on an engineering pathway because that's what he was, but he didn't have a college degree. And he felt that pain of that ceiling, even though at the time it's really sounds really fancy, right? He was the head electrical engineer of the nuclear submarine program at Engels at the time when they built submarines in Pascagoula, Mississippi. But he was like, I can't do anything else. And then he was, you know, hit retirement and had a great life in retirement, but always kind of felt like had more opportunity waiting for me. So he really pushed me in that direction. And as a dutiful son does, he completely pushed against it, right? That's not what I want to do. I want to go to the summer. I want to go to the beach. It's the 90s. Come on, like it's a different era. So we always struggled, but ended up at community college. Uh, actually was gonna come to Mississippi State, but stayed closer to the coast for uh several different reasons, including family. Found myself back at college years later. So it took me a seven-year pathway to get my college degree, get into the workforce and figure out in a few years, you know, four or five that I need to go back and reeducate myself. So I got my master's degree prior to online classes, which would have been great. So did that uh and then really unlocked my potential. So it's also getting that first degree is a big deal. But those folks sitting at home that have an undergrad degree that are thinking about what's that master's process look like, it can make a huge impact on either redirecting your career or giving you that opportunity to advance more into leadership that you want to do. Um, so all those options are great. And I tell people all the time, like my master's degree really changed the trajectory of my life. But the big part of that was because I didn't roll immediately into it after my undergrad degree. That work experience in between was a big deal.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Well, and we talk about traditional students being those students that are coming from high school to straight to college. There's that your story is so many people's story. So it's even hard now to go, what is traditional?

SPEAKER_02 37:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

Because that story is a lot of people's story.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

Well, and I've got two kids at college now. So I've got two at college and two in high school. And the split between them is already vastly different because the two in high school are deciding one of them wants to be a plumber. And I was like, awesome! Like the the world will need them. AI will never replace you, I promise. But there's another one that's like, you know, I'm doing this college program in high school that's teaching me all about drones and how to build them and how to repair them and how to 3D print all the parts. Like, I think I want to do this right when I get out of high school. And they're telling me I can make a lot of money and I can go do these things. I was like, well, you know, I and then I remember the conversations my dad and I had. I was like, you should go to college first. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if that is the pathway for him, but I think education certainly is. So one of the first things we did was like, well, look at the certification programs that either Mississippi offers or another university, a community university, in your footprint of where you want to be, whether that's down the coast or right here in Starkville, because the learning is going to be important for you. And it gives you that extra step on whoever's gonna be your competitor for that job or that position. So, and we're coming back from a car trip, and Lex in the backseat said to his mom, is like, Mom, I've been thinking more about college. It's like, okay, great. It's like me and Chat have been having a discussion about it. It was like Chat, I've been chat GBT have been having a lot of discussions, and he's running analytics and money and differences and all that stuff happening in that system where if we go back to our AEO conversation, we are not optimized to be in in that conversation. So that's just a real world example of what can shift one or two things. So now Aaron's is parenting as well. In some way, yeah. Is that what you're saying? Well, look, kids always trust other parents before they trust you. So Chad's right there with them.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

So as we kind of uh start wrapping up, let's pull back a little bit. The public uh perception of higher ed is not at its highest right now, as far as from a positive standpoint. How do how chief marketing officers at universities approach that?

SPEAKER_02 40:08

I I think we have to be as transparent as possible in situations where you can be, and you have to be authentic. That means sometimes you're gonna tell people things that they don't want to hear. And that could be hey, you know, Lex may not be built for college, right? He may need to be, he may better succeed in this system, but I will do everything in my power to help you find him where he succeeds. Uh, the other thing is obviously the trust and research, and everything that we've seen in a lot of different ways is is the research coming out of a university having an impact on my average person who doesn't go to universities day-to-day life? And the answer is yes, in a lot of ways, whether it's food security, whether it's national security and the cyber center that we're building in uh Biloxi in partnership with Keysler to help train air forcement on how to create site safe cyber and also to be, you know, active against scammers and other systems. Those things impact your day-to-day life all the time. Uh, we also have like our athlete engineering program for those folks that are working at Chevron or they're working at HHI and Engels. Or we're creating systems that make sure that they're safer in the work that they do in a lot of different ways. That's the stories we need to be really telling and sharing. Because right now, if we're not telling that story, nobody else is.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

And we used to didn't have to. I mean, you used to, it was just you trust universities. Yeah. I mean, and but now we have to prove it. We have to prove that we are such a positive part of the economy and people's individual lives, in addition to the recruitment aspect of the of the marketing industry.

SPEAKER_02 41:43

Yes. We've really focused on storytelling from the in the last six months on the idea of impact and innovation. Mississippi State is the university for impact and innovation for the state of Mississippi. And we innovate much more beyond that, whether we're in Italy in architecture or we're across the globe and doing lots of different uh opportunities where it's food safety or you know, teaching people how to grow ag in different ways and the cybersecurity stuff we talked about before. You know, we also may have taken for granted that people just knew those things. Yeah. And one of the marketing tactics that I share all the time is like embrace your boredom. If you're really bored of something because you do it every day, there's probably a thousand people that would watch that YouTube video on, you know, repeat over and over again because it's fascinating to them. And I go back to the old Mr. Rogers bit about, you know, Crayola crayons and seeing that as a kid for the first time. And you would watch it forever. And it's pretty boring to the people that work in the factory, but it's like fascinating to see how they make crayons. So whether it's we're flying drones for safety and we're training FEMA people how to fly drones to check flood variations or for rescue efforts, that's pretty cool when you go and watch it. Those guys may not think it's that cool because they're just flying drones all the time. Or, you know, we're doing stuff out with the equestrian center and all the things that we do with our large livestock or our CVM in the vet school. They find things that are pretty boring to them all the time that other people would love to see. So the investment goes back to that chief marketing officer position so that we can ensure we're telling that story in ways that other people can connect with.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

Jared, I feel like we need a ticker so that we can tick off every time our marketing person names a program that we have at Mississippi State, getting them all in there.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

Yeah, I'm sure I'll hear from some that I left.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Ding ding ding. 214 programs. That's right. Do you have anything else before we wrap it up today?

SPEAKER_00 43:37

Um, I I have like a couple of uh I'm sorry, I'm the person that goes off script. I have a couple like maybe we can like wrap up. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, yeah, the expose part of um so I think uh I I'd love to hear what one of your favorite stories that we've told about Mississippi State is, or that your your group has told about Mississippi State.

SPEAKER_02 43:59

Yeah, there's one really Cool when it came across my desk right when I got here, and I use it an example all the time, so I'll share. And I think it highlights a lot of the things that we've talked about. And we often have recommendations for maybe a teacher of the year or these different other accolades that we provide when we do our staff appreciation day. And one letter came across our newsroom's desk, and whenever they see a cool story, they try to bring it to me and say, Hey, can you do something with this? Is there something with it? And this was a young lady who did a huge, like three pages, and wrote this little essay about why they supported this person for this role. And in her story, she said, I came to school and I double majored in things that people said did not make sense and would never really I'm just wasting my time and my dollars. And she wanted to double major in fashion design and chemistry. So she goes through this, of course, as you do, right? So she goes through this stuff and she tells, like, when she told her advisor, because she was so worried that this wouldn't work, she was like, We got you. Like this could be really awesome. Like, we haven't dealt with this before. We're gonna figure out this plan, we're gonna, you know, overlap as much as we can so you don't have to duplicate classes, but this could be really cool. And she signed this letter as, you know, and today I work at NASA designing spacesuits.

SPEAKER_03 45:15

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 45:16

So that was the encouragement that sent me on the way to go do this stuff. So fashion design and chemistry was a great story uh that we hear. You know, one of my favorite things we're doing right now is I go to class series.

SPEAKER_03 45:27

Love that.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

We're taking students and showing them what's behind the scenes. We've been into carbon fiber making, we've been into welding, which is gonna come out soon. We've been out to the horse park, which again was a very boring day for them. They were loading horses and learning how to put them on trailers for three hours. So you put the horse on the trailer, you take the horse off the trailer, you put it on, you take them off. And we went out there with a camera. We're like, this is amazing. Like you gotta warm the horses up, like you're getting you're creating all these interactions with them. So we we did seven or eight of those that we have in the can, and I think five of them are there, and we have a few more that are coming out. But it just shows again, hands-on experience is important, and we have that in a lot of different ways that you may not have imagined. Whether it's our fashion design classroom, which was our first one that was kind of cool, our meteorology classroom, which showed how students are making these maps and doing all this other stuff. So those are a couple examples that have been really fun to tell.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Yeah, I love that series.

SPEAKER_01 46:21

It's really entertaining. Um, the equine people are like, if you thought that was exciting, you should come on surgery day.

SPEAKER_02 46:28

We went out for full season. Uh, so we checked on all the mamas last year, which was a lot of fun too. Um, but there's all kind of things that are out there.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

So if we were having this episode 10 years from now, what do you think would be the biggest trend that we would be talking about?

SPEAKER_02 46:43

Oh gosh, 10 years from now, it's still going to maybe next week, the way things are going. It moves so fast. If I were to future cast that far away, I think it is it's much more about the technology of getting the studies and much less about the infrastructure that's there. So we're doing way more online class learnings. You're probably even to a point where it was hokey four years ago, but maybe not so much now. You are in a virtual reality setting. You're basically in the holodeck from Star Trek The Next Generation to where you're interacting and engaging with people from the comfort of your desk, especially if you're that person that's in Indiana or wherever you may be. I think those are the technology jumps that make it really important. You probably also have a personal GPT in your pocket that knows everything about you. So that if you need to plug in something, maybe all your forms are coming from. There's probably a lot of interaction that those things are going to solve. But the way things are changing, yeah. The one thing I'm certain from when they told us we're not gonna have flying cars yet. So that's the only thing we can hang our hat on because we were promised those 30 years ago. But maybe things are a lot different and a lot easier to access, especially from the information base uh and how we teach.

SPEAKER_01 47:56

We won't have the flying cars from Jetsons, but we will have Rosie.

SPEAKER_02 47:59

Yes, right. Oh, that's a great point. Because we could be walking down the halls and we've got, you know, bipedal robots that are all AI focused doing different things for us.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

Well, thank you for being here today. This is fun. Appreciate you having me. Great conversation. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Come back and visit us again sometime. Anytime you want to. And before 10 years, you don't have to wait that long.

SPEAKER_02 48:19

That's good. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

And thanks uh for everybody for listening today. Thank you for joining us on Uncharted State. We hope today's conversation sparks some new ideas about the future of higher education. Get followed so you never miss an episode. Never know what uncharted territory will explore next.